English

Hyper-X: A Unified Hypernetwork for Multi-Task Multilingual Transfer

Computation and Language 2022-10-26 v3

Abstract

Massively multilingual models are promising for transfer learning across tasks and languages. However, existing methods are unable to fully leverage training data when it is available in different task-language combinations. To exploit such heterogeneous supervision, we propose Hyper-X, a single hypernetwork that unifies multi-task and multilingual learning with efficient adaptation. This model generates weights for adapter modules conditioned on both tasks and language embeddings. By learning to combine task and language-specific knowledge, our model enables zero-shot transfer for unseen languages and task-language combinations. Our experiments on a diverse set of languages demonstrate that Hyper-X achieves the best or competitive gain when a mixture of multiple resources is available, while being on par with strong baselines in the standard scenario. Hyper-X is also considerably more efficient in terms of parameters and resources compared to methods that train separate adapters. Finally, Hyper-X consistently produces strong results in few-shot scenarios for new languages, showing the versatility of our approach beyond zero-shot transfer.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2205.12148,
  title  = {Hyper-X: A Unified Hypernetwork for Multi-Task Multilingual Transfer},
  author = {Ahmet Üstün and Arianna Bisazza and Gosse Bouma and Gertjan van Noord and Sebastian Ruder},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2205.12148},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

Accepted at EMNLP 2022 (Main Conference)

R2 v1 2026-06-24T11:27:13.522Z